The Same Deep Water as Me at the Donmar Warehouse is a new play about "no win,
no fee" culture that fails to live up to the promise of Nick Payne's earlier
play, Constellations, says Charles Spencer.

I was one of the judges who awarded Nick Payne the Evening Standard’s best new play award for Constellations, a marvellous piece about love, loss and multiverse theory. It began life at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, transferred to the West End and miraculously combined complex ideas with a powerful undertow of emotion.

So hopes were high for this new piece about the “no win, no fee” compensation culture that has led to so many of us paying grotesquely inflated car insurance premiums as a result of accident claims for often fictitious injuries. If someone gently shunts into the back of your car these days you could be looking at nice little earner for non-existent whiplash.

But though the play is carefully researched and often mildly entertaining – the dramatist has a particularly good ear for quirky one-liners – it never achieves dramatic lift-off, still less becomes a potent metaphor for the grubby materialistic times in which we live.

The action is set in Luton at the shabby office of Scorpion Claims, a two-man personal injury legal firm. Business is slow. Barry is an honest plodder, who seems more interested in exotic herbal teas, scratch cards and visits to Greggs than making a financial killing, but his younger partner Andrew is a less scrupulous solicitor. When Andrew’s chavvy old schoolmate Kevin arrives with a dodgy claim, the young solicitor is more than ready to enter into a criminal fraud.

Watching the play made me marvel afresh at the way David Mamet can turn a scam into great theatre with the help of a tight plot and rat-a-tat dialogue. Here everything plods along and the play’s structure is mess. Several characters are introduced only to mysteriously disappear from the narrative altogether. And plausibility goes right out of the window when one of the dodgy cases winds up in an intermittently entertaining court scene.

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One knows that judges are occasionally incapable of seeing the wood for the trees, but the witnesses here are so palpably lying that it seems inconceivable that the judge, wittily played by Peter Forbes, wouldn’t throw the case out of court and possibly call in the old Bill to further investigate their manifestly fraudulent claim.

You can often tell that a play is in trouble when a writer attempts to raise the dramatic ante with a sudden explosion of unexpected physical violence, and sure enough Payne does just that here. And it seems frankly incredible that it takes the honest solicitor in the partnership so long to rumble his devious colleague.

Director John Crowley does what he can for this lame duck of a play, and the performances are often excellent. Daniel Mays is memorably dark and devious as Andrew, Nigel Lindsay brings a battered decency to the stage as his colleague and Marc Wootton presents us with the authentic face of slobbish, greedy Britain as the chief fraudster.

But there is something slightly sad and desperate about a con-trick drama that can’t persuade the audience to suspend its disbelief.